Time to slip on the Thinking caps at Liberal HQ

The Liberal Party probably don’t realise it yet, but they have actually caught a break with the sudden reality check that has been forced upon them.

Compared to Labor, Liberal leaders typically have greater freedom to structure the party to their liking but turning the party into some sort of Cult is getting a long way from Traditional Liberal Values. For a good while now I thought they hadn’t noticed but the sudden loss of two State Governments has the non-cultists thinking hard about how much damage the Cult of Tony can deliver to the Party.

Surprisingly, the PM doesn’t seem to realise the party room has the Votes that grant the privilege of Leadership, and that chants and slogans aren’t going to cut it there. He even went on camera recently to declare only the Voters can remove a Prime Minister. A claim that is demonstrably wrong with the last 2 Prime Ministers being removed by the party room while still in Office.

Just because you claim something doesn’t make it true and Tony ends up looking naive when he makes these foolish comments. It simply reinforces the public perception that he is out of touch, which is the exact opposite of what he needs to achieve.

You can pull that one on the rusted on voters but what he really needs is the middle of the road Voter. The ones who don’t sign on for the Greed is Good mantra. The ones who are giving him a good thrashing in the opinion polls.

Interestingly, we are seeing some cult like behaviour on FaceBook at the moment where material from the rustys is being circulated with Tony as the focus instead of the Party. Instead of understanding that the problem is the dishonesty and trying to get the Party up to a higher standard of performance, their approach is to double down on the BS and hope folk will wake up tomorrow morning and suddenly fall in love with the Dear Leader despite his treatment of the Voters. That would have to be an outcome sitting at very long odds. Folk tend to get irritated when others start trying to gloss over the reality and when Tony starts pumping up his own tires, it simply rubs salt into the wound.

It’s tough times ahead for Tony because he doesn’t actually understand what is going wrong and has incorrectly assumed he doesn’t get up in front of the media enough. If he was a reader, and going by his track record on Science he isn’t, he would realise that every time he gets up and tells porkys to the Voters, his popularity drops. When he takes time off, his popularity goes up. It’s not rocket science.

Most arrogant of all is Tony’s view ( or I should say stated view. There is a good measure of self interest in Tony’s stated view) that he knows what Voters think.

It’s clearly wrong.

He believes the Public think it’s important to keep the Leader no matter how inept he is. The Public think it’s best to have the right person for the job and why should we wait 3 years to correct the problem?

We don’t actually care who sits in the seat but we do care how competent that person is. When they do a poor job and then refuse to accept responsibility the Voters would prefer to move on and get someone who can actually do the job.

The choice for the Liberal party is to find someone capable of doing the job or do nothing and leave it to Labor to guide the country after the next Election.